Elijah

Whit is giving the Imagination Station an overhaul. With Tom Riley lending a hand, he has divided the machine in two so that kids can ride two at a time, each side running its own adventure. The programming is not finished, so Whit hangs a keep-off sign on it and heads for the computer room. Robyn Jacobs pays the sign no mind. Over Jack Davis's protests she climbs into one side just to sit, admires the panel of pretty lights, and, unable to hear Jack calling her out, goes hunting for the switch that opens the door. She pushes the wrong button. Jack runs to the other door, finds a solid wall between the seats, and starts pressing buttons to reach her; the flashing white one, and a voice reciting words about a land with neither dew nor rain and about the word of the Lord coming to Elijah, send him on a journey of his own.

Jack lands on a dusty road beside a sickly cow, where a young manservant named Benjamin pokes him with a stick and demands to know if he is a thief - three years without rain have turned plenty of honest people into thieves and scavengers. Once Jack convinces him otherwise, Benjamin talks freely. Everyone in the country tells stories about his master: a widow whose jars of flour and oil were filled by a miracle, her son raised from the dead, and now God has told the master to go to King Ahab, after which the Lord will bring rain back upon the land. The master proves to be Elijah the Tishbite, and Jack, sure that following the prophet will lead him to his lost friend, begs to come along. Elijah agrees to take him as far as the palace on two conditions: Jack must obey him in everything, as his servant, and must trade his strange foreign clothes for some of Benjamin's. Benjamin has warned Jack that the villagers are kindly and his friend is probably safe, so long as she stays out of the way of the wicked queen - and the queen is exactly where Robyn is.

Eliadah has caught Robyn wandering the palace in search of Mr. Whittaker and hauls her, scratching and threatening to call the police, before Queen Jezebel. Her talk of Imagination Stations and telephones sounds like gibberish, her clothes look like a disguise, and the queen sends her to the palace prison as a spy, where two prisoners cheerfully help her round out a list of complaints: the wet, the cold, the rats, the food, the plumbing they do not have. Then she is fetched out and handed to Obadiah, an official of the king and queen, who warns her that the queen is a suspicious woman and that she must be very, very careful. On the way they meet King Ahab himself, too anxious about the drought killing his horses and mules to bother with spies; he orders Obadiah to search the valleys and springs to the northeast for water and grazing land while he goes southeast, and grumbles that his wife plays with children while the animals die in the fields.

Obadiah delivers Robyn to Jezebel's temple, where the priest Jehosabab stands ready with offerings so that Baal and Asherah will reveal everything about her. Robyn will not bow. She knows the Ten Commandments, and she is not going to kneel to an idol no matter who commands it. To Jezebel that answers everything: the girl is a spy for the worshippers of Yahweh, whose people she has sent to their deaths before. The queen offers a last choice, bow down or give up her life, and when Robyn still refuses, Jezebel pronounces the sentence: the little waif will die.